The Riddler: Year One
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Award-winning actor Paul Dano expands upon the backstory of the character he played in Matt Reeves’s hit movie The Batman. This version of the Riddler isn’t simply an amusing eccentric with an affinity for wordplay and baffling clues, but as terrifying a villain as any in the annals of the Dark Knight. Here you will see Edward Nashton evolve into a menace who holds all of Gotham City in his grip. How did an unknown forensic accountant uncover the dark secrets of both Gotham’s underworld and its political leaders and come so close to bringing down the entire city? This prequel to The Batman presents the detailed, disturbing, and at times shocking story of a man with nothing to lose. Dano is joined by acclaimed European artist Stevan Subic, making his American comics debut. Collects The Riddler: Year One #1-6.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Actor Dano's comics debut turns the backstory he dreamed up to enrich his performance as the Riddler in 2022's The Batman into a dank origin story of the villain. Drawn with shattered-glass intensity by Subic (the Conan the Cimmerian series), this standalone volume follows Edward Nashton's steady march from brutalized foundling to sad-sack accountant to rising terrorist warlord looking to "cut out the rot" in Gotham (a phrase he scrawls obsessively across expense forms). Pulling straight from the Paul Schrader and Andrew Kevin Walker handbook for awkward, disaffected psychopaths, Dano lays on the humiliation, self-hatred, and moral disgust until it seems impossible for Edward to do anything but turn murderous vigilante. Though the series' gothic gloom is heavy-handed, it creates an effectively claustrophobic mood as Edward, accidentally and then obsessively, uncovers a web of deceit connecting Gotham's Mafiosi with political leaders and industrial tycoons. His desire to purge the city seems borne less from idealistic hatred of corruption and more from a desire to avenge the trauma that broke him in a Wayne family–funded orphanage. It's a familiar schematic but well done, and deepens a villain often rendered as a punch line.
